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Progress…?

Said farewell to an old friend today: the 14″ Sony KVM1400U TV that my parents bought for me when I left home in June 1993. (I well remember double-checking with the man in the shop that it had a SCART input, as I was desperate to get a better picture from my Commodore Amiga 500+ than the RF input I’d been using up to then gave me… and eschewing the slightly more expensive variant that had teletext, as that seemed like something I’d never use.)

It’s been used almost daily since then and was still working perfectly, and I hate replacing stuff that does. But if nothing else, it had been dropped so many times that the case was in several bits and I couldn’t really guarantee it was still electrically safe. So off to the great recycling plant in the sky (well, Argos) it went. Somehow I doubt that the 19″ LED TV we bought to replace it, for almost exactly the same price in numerical terms, will last another couple of decades.

(We aren’t a completely CRT-free household yet, though—we have a larger and equally well-used Sony warhorse in the dining room that’s probably still got a year or two left in it!)

9 thoughts on “Progress…?”

It saddens me the amount of electronics I throw away on a yearly basis. Stuff may be cheap these days, but I would gladly pay a premium if things would just be a bit more durable.

I have a Mac Classic that is just about two decades old now, and it still boots. Yet almost without exception, everything I bought in the last decade seems to just break, die, or malfunction randomly after 2-3 years.

And nice to see you still at Snoracle! fighting the good fight. Speaking of which, I´ll never forgive Sun for not betting the company on Sun JDS Linux… R2 was _so_ close… it could be today´s Ubuntu…

Speaking of which, why doesn´t ORCL sell a “Oracle Unbreakable Linux _Desktop_” just based on Fedora with ORCL´s kernel patches on top?.

H*ck, they´re doing it with CentOS and RHEL, why not do the rebranding dance on the desktop, too?. Plus, they could revive the JDS name, this time preloading Apache OpenOffice, Netbeans, Glassfish and OpenJDK

Kudos from Argentina
FC
PS: Yes, Sony made the best CRTs. I still have a 29″ High-Definition CRT (but from Philips, I hope it lasts at least half the life of my average Sony!).

@Fernando Yeah, I was disappointed we didn’t persist with JDS Linux a bit longer, especially as we had R3 pretty much ready to ship before it was cancelled, so it only ever appeared on Solaris 10. That said, I’m not sure if Linux would ever have permeated the Solaris-soaked Sun culture enough to make it a success.